FREE THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION: ESSAYS ON LITERATURE AND SOCIETY PDF Lionel Trilling,Louis Menand | 336 pages | 23 Oct 2008 | The New York Review of Books, Inc | 9781590172834 | English | New York, United States The Liberal Imagination - Wikipedia The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society is a collection of sixteen essays by American literary critic Lionel Trillingpublished by Viking in The book was edited by Pascal Covici, who had worked with Trilling when he edited and introduced Viking's Portable Matthew Arnold in The essays, then, represent Trilling's written work and critical thoughts of the s. In the essays, Trilling explores the theme of what he calls "liberalism" by looking closely at the relationship between literature, culture, mind, and the imagination. He offers passionate critiques against literary ideas of reality as material and physical, such as those he ascribes to V. ParringtonTheodore Dreiserand the writers of the Kinsey Reports. He supports writers who engage in "moral realism" through an engaged imagination and a "power of love," which he sees expressed in works by Henry JamesMark TwainTacitusF. Scott Fitzgeraldand William Wordsworth —and in the ideas of human nature in the works of Sigmund Freud. Blackmore, Norman Podhoretzand Delmore Schwartzrepresent the importance of this book to the "Intellectuals. Trilling argues that because his contemporary America is predominantly tending to an intellectually liberal tradition, the lack of a robust conservative intellectual tradition causes the lack of a cultural dialectic, making liberal ideas also weak. Trilling confronts the influence of literary critic V. Trilling argues that Parrington believed in a reality that is "immutable; it is wholly external, it is irreducible," and that Parrington believed the job of a literary writer to be the transmission of this reality by loyal reproduction. This conception of reality can turn Americans toward an unwarranted "sympathetic indulgence" of writers, such as Dreiser, who claim to represent material reality "hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant. It also informs a disavowal of writers, such as Henry Jamesthat engage in the "electrical qualities of the mind," and are not easily conformed to a social mission or politic. Trilling addresses the The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society work and career of novelist Sherwood Andersontrying to reconcile his admiration for the man with the problems of his work. He assesses Anderson as victim to the fate "of the writer who at one short past moment has had a success with a simple idea which he allowed to remain simple and fixed. In his reading of the novel, Trilling points out James's "penetrating imagination" that gives an accurate account and imagining of not only the anarchy of the s, but also the "social actuality" of anarchy's general moral claim on the goodness of humanity and the corruptive character of society. Trilling investigates the autobiographical aspects of the novel to conclude The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society the novel also acts as James's "demonstrative message," and that the artist possesses social responsibility. James's novel is an achievement of what Trilling calls "moral realism," which rests on James's "knowledge of complication," a penetrating awareness of "modern ironies," and an "imagination of disaster" complemented by an "imagination of love. Trilling wrote this essay on the event of the publication of The Partisan Readercelebrating the ten-year anniversary of the literary magazine Partisan Reviewa magazine that, though influential, maintained a relatively low circulation. Trilling describes Huck's moral crisis as being between his "genuinely good will" and his distrust of others, based on a "profound and bitter knowledge of human depravity. Trilling sees Rudyard Kipling as a writer belonging "irrevocably to our past;" specifically, the past of childhood, where a justified rejection of him represents "our first literary-political decision. In so doing, Trilling argues, Kipling did damage to the very national values he cared so much about. Trilling confronts the notion that an artist's imagination and The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society comes from a neurotic illness. Trilling believes, countering the formal reading style of the New Criticsthat we must read literature with a sense of its past. The aesthetic aspect of a work's "pastness" "the intellectual conditions in which a work of literature was made" is an important part of understanding its power, validity, and relevance. Trilling also argues that literary artists are both effects and causes of culture, and that historical criticism which treats a literary movement as something that can fail or succeed incorrectly supposes ideas are autonomous "generators of human events," that literature is meant to settle the problems of life "for good," and that the will plays little part in human life. Thus, Trilling suggests evoking Nietzsche "an ambivalent view" of the historical sense that looks to culture as "life's continuing evaluation of itself. Trilling argues that though his histories "have been put to strange uses," Roman historian Tacitus had a psychological "conception of history [that] was avowedly personal and moral. Trilling argues that manners, the "hum and buzz of implication," are The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society significant part of the formation of culture, and therefore are an important part of literature. He sees a novel's focus on social manners as a focus on a moral conflict between reality and appearance, a research into the truth behind the "snobbery" of false appearance and The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society status. A novelist's creative awareness of manners becomes the "function of his love," making his literary work what Trilling calls "moral realism," in which the moral imagination is given free play. Trilling concludes that the novel The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society manners has never been "established" in America because of a conception of reality as the "hard, brute facts of existence. Trilling introduces the The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society and commercial success of The Kinsey Reports as a therapy for society's need for the establishment of a "community of sexuality" and a symptom of that community's need to be "established in explicit quantitative terms. Trilling argues that the Report dehumanizes sexual behavior and rejects the idea that sex is involved with an "individual's character. Trilling concludes that the Report's idea of fact as a "physical fact" rejects the crucial "personal or cultural meaning," or "even the existence," of the social fact of sexuality. Trilling examines the life and literary career of American novelist F. Scott Fitzgeraldadmiring Fitzgerald's heroism found "in his power of love. Trilling calls Fitzgerald "a moralist to the core," because Fitzgerald was able to transcend the historical moment to "seize the moment as a moral fact. Trilling reflects on whether "the novel is still a living form," concluding that he does not believe the novel to be dead. He sees the declining perception of the novel as reflective of a weakness in the "general intellectual life" and a passivity in the political mind. Trilling argues that the novel, as a "celebration and investigation of the human will," can reconstitute the will by teaching it to refuse the temptation of the ideologies of the social world. Trilling predicts that the novels of the future will "deal very explicitly with ideas," and that they should criticize ideas by attaching them to their "appropriately actuality," instead of allowing ideas to be systematized thoughtlessly through ideology. Trilling wants novelists to realize their ability "to maintain ambivalence toward their society," and wants a general understanding of the "fortuitous and gratuitous nature of art" that makes an intellectual atmosphere where novels are possible. Trilling defines an idea as the product of The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society juxtaposition of two emotions, and as the key dialectic component of literature. He sees the anxiety about The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society in literature as actually an anxiety that ideology, a "respect for certain formulas" whose "meaning and consequence we have no clear understanding," will intellectualize the power and spontaneity out of life. Poets, Trilling argues, can be attracted to ideas without being "violated" by them, and poets often try to develop consistent intellectual positions along with their poetry. Trilling elevates the importance of "activity" in literary thinking that keeps ideas constantly at play with one another. Trilling concludes by advocating that we think of ideas as "living things, inescapably connected with our wills and desires," in order The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society facilitate a more active literature. Commentators of The Liberal Imagination note two distinguishing qualities of Trilling's prose: his use of the plural singular and the balanced sentence. Howe describes Trilling as an ideologue whose work is "excessively dependent on that mere will whose danger he has so often observed. A year-old student at Columbia and writing for British journal ScrutinyNorman Podhoretzlater to become a substantial figure in the " neo- conservative " movement that